Aug 04 2017

This Week in Forensic Science

No one has hours to scour the papers to keep up with the latest news, so we’ve curated the top news stories in the field of Forensic Science for this week. Here’s what you need to know to get out the door!

Analytics, the mathematical search for insights in data, could help law enforcement combat human trafficking. Human trafficking is essentially a supply chain in which the “supply” (human victims) moves through a network to meet “demand” (for cheap, vulnerable and illegal labor). Traffickers leave a data trail, however faint or broken, despite their efforts to operate off the grid and in the shadows.

In a study published Thursday in mSystems, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers studied the skin microbiomes of 10 sexually active, heterosexual couples living together.

Accurately determining the time since death is an important aspect of forensic sciences and casework. New research indicates that this might be achieved by examining changes in the bacterial communities of the mouth that occur after death.

But there are limits to what scientists can divine from insects. Bug behavior rarely provides precise timelines. In particular, “numerous weaknesses and erroneous beliefs” plague the use of insects to reveal whether a body has been moved, according to the authors of a report published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ.

Although most people don’t broadcast in advance their intention to engage in criminal activity, University of Virginia Assistant Professor of Systems and Engineering Information Matthew Gerber has discovered that the use of Twitter can help predict crime. Gerber’s research and work developing statistical crime prediction methods will be presented on Tuesday, August 1, 2017, at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Baltimore, Md.

Now, ancient DNA suggests that living Greeks are indeed the descendants of Mycenaeans, with only a small proportion of DNA from later migrations to Greece. And the Mycenaeans themselves were closely related to the earlier Minoans, the study reveals, another great civilization that flourished on the island of Crete from 2600 B.C.E. to 1400 B.C.E. (named for the mythical King Minos).

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